Today on Wale’s musings, we will be looking at what makes someone a gentleman or lady, I call it a whole spectrum. This is my reflection on one of our brush-up lectures at Lagos Business School (LBS) during our orientation week.
What is Incivility?
Incivility is a wide range of deviant behaviors that someone exhibits. It can be in the office, community, or a defined space. It is an irritating, annoying, unacceptable behavior with a counter-productive outcome.
How important is Workplace civility?
This defines how you interact with the people you work with or do business with. Business is all about relationships, so the behaviors being exhibited in your workplace will impact productivity and the brand in the long run. This will reflect on how people outside view your company and how they will receive your business ideas.
The cost of Incivility in workplaces is high.
This shows how important civility is to the continued existence of an organization. Civility scores the culture of the organization, once an organization is notorious for a particular behavior, it drives potential clients, employees, and investors away, so long they cannot stand such behaviors. The stories of a company either good or bad as described by people who had encounters with it underscore the image and perception of the company, remember people don’t leave organizations- people leave people. A case in point is when an entire IT department of a bank leaves the organization at the same time because of their perceived poor working conditions.
Impact of Incivility in the workplace on an employee.
When people do not feel valued and validated in an organization, some behaviors will begin to spring up, common amongst:
- Avoidance behavior: human beings are emotional, as employees they will do the bare minimum once they are not happy in the workspace. Here employees start to actively avoid the person causing them emotional distress.
- Psychological Distress: refers to non-specific symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. This is reflective when employees can’t wait to go home on Fridays and feel terrible they will be resuming work on Mondays.
- Absenteeism: Here, people start to call in absent more often to avoid the emotional distress in the workplace.
- Declined Productivity: When people are not coming to work as they should, overall job productivity will start to decline.
- High staff turnover: Employees will always look for a better working environment and conditions if there are too many distressing factors in the job place. This is illustrated above where an entire IT team left an organization.
We’ve all heard of (or experienced) the “boss from hell.” The stress of ongoing hostility from a manager takes a toll, sometimes a big one on both the employee and the company, that is why organizations like Cisco now implement a “Global Workplace Civility Programme” to tame the potential losses from incivility in there organization estimated at $12 million a year.
Civility can be Learned.
Civil behavior can be learned and can be passed as a culture in an organization. Some of the ways civility can be entrenched in an organization are the following:
- Ask for feedback: As a manager, you may need a reality check from the people who work for you. Employees won’t always be honest, but there are tools you can use on your own. For example, keep a journal in which you track instances of civility and incivility and note changes that you’d like to make.
- Hire for civility: Avoid bringing incivility into the workplace to begin with. Include civility orientation course during staff unbundling, create an atmosphere where incivility cannot thrive from the beginning.
- Reward good behavior: Good behaviors should be in every staff performance review don’t overlook bad behaviors.
- Penalize bad behavior: Even the best companies occasionally make bad hires, and new employees may be accustomed to different norms. The trick is to identify and try to correct any troublesome behavior quickly.
- Conduct exit interviews: It’s crucial, to gather information from and reflect on the experiences and reactions of employees who leave because of incivility.
We will close this week with a direct quote from Peter Drucker which states that ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’. Note, no matter how you plan and strategize for your organizations future, if there is no good culture entrenched there is a great likelihood the strategy will not be achieved.
Till we meet next week when we will be considering Etiquette as a whole spectrum, have a nice week ahead.
Wale
EARLY CHILDHOOD